Certain benzodiazepines are known to be depressants of the central nervous system and are accepted in treatment of patients with symptoms ranging from anxiety to panic. Hitherto they have not been recognized as useful in treating immunological unbalance, such as may give rise to a variety of conditions commonly treated with analgesics, emollients, hormones, and steroids, for example.
Many people suffer from such disorders of the skin, mouth, or gastrointestinal tract as psoriasis, recurrent mouth ulcers, and ulcerative colitis for years with little or no relief. Others have even more debilitating afflictions of circulatory, muscular, and nervous systems, for which no successful treatment is known. Moreover, insult may be added to injury as the patients themselves are often characterized by members of the public as "mental" cases deemed responsible for their own symptoms, if only involuntarily.
My invention is directed to relieving at least the symptoms of such disorders and especially of human leucocyte antigen (HLA) related diseases, as by selectively seeking out and eliminating autoimmune abnormality or unbalance responsible for intractability of such disorders when subjected to more conventional treatment. Such disorder exemplified here is Crohn's disease. More general immunological depression or suppression can also be, in at least some instances, susceptible to similar treatment.